Mr. Somers is a self-proclaimed lover of all things German. After having studied the language in university in the U.S., he traveled and worked throughout Germany for a number of years. These experiences have given him a unique perspective on German culture.

His humor and appreciation of the differences between Americans and Germans comes through in every chapter. Topics addressed include: the German transportation system, eating and drinking habits, celebrations and holidays, politics, music, and many more. The book is organized into 22 compact chapters making it easy for people to choose what is of interest to them.

Of particular interest to me was chapter 3,  titled Rules, Rules and More Rules: Is this allowed? It deals with how rule-oriented Germans are. For North Americans this can be a difficult transition to life in Germany as things are more flexible or negotiable in our society than they are in Germanic society. An example given in the book is that a regular citizen can reprimand you for jaywalking!

In sum, this is an excellent book and a fast and entertaining read for anyone looking for some insights into German culture.

What most people do not understand is that to become a translator or interpreter one must understand all the varied nuances between two languages so as not to commit any mistakes. Training takes many years of both schooling and “living the language.” Found in Translation is full of anecdotes of what can happen when an unqualified person attempts to translate or interpret.

When I first started learning Spanish 17 years ago I remember coming across words which seemed to be the same in both languages but in fact had very different meanings. Anyone who has studied a language has found themselves on the wrong side of these “false friends.” Kelly details one such example in Chapter 1 in a side note titled Embarrassed to be Embarazada. I always get a good chuckle from my beginner Spanish students when I explain that the Spanish expression “estoy embarazada” has very little to do with being embarrassed but rather being pregnant!

I particularly enjoyed chapter 5, Partaking in Pleasures and Delighting the Senses in Translation. One part of this chapter gives hilarious examples of when companies get international brand names very wrong; so wrong that they are unsellable in English-speaking countries. Some examples given include the following: a Polish juice named Fart, a sports drink in the Czech Republic named Erektus, and a soft drink from Ghana called Pee Cola. For your eating pleasure you will find the Chinese snack food Only Puke, Prick, a Brazilian potato chips brand and Shitto which is apparently the name given to a spicy pepper sauce. I think it’s fair to say that these companies did not invest in proper translation!

An overarching theme of the book is how translators and interpreters often go unnoticed and underappreciated. Even I was surprised at many of the ways translation affects our everyday life without us even being aware of it. Translation is crucial for healthcare, the justice system, scientific advancements, politics and even love stories to reach their potential. I have heard Nataly Kelly speak on one of my favorite language podcasts PRI’s The World in Words where she very eloquently explained how she has a brief window into a very intimate moment in a person’s life and then she is gone often without knowing the outcome. This rang especially true when she described her experiences interpreting 911 calls.

In sum, Found in Translation is a wonderful read that can be enjoyed by language service professionals, students of language or just those curious about this profession. The book contains an extensive notes section with excellent resources for those in the interpreting and translation fields as well as an extensive index to cross reference specific interests.

Speak: a short history of languages, was written by Tore Janson, a Swedish linguistics and language professor. The book uncovers the history of how the world’s languages have evolved over the years from prehistory through to modern day touching on the earliest civilizations of Africa, Asia and Europe. The book gives a good overview of the world’s large language groupings and explains how languages go from being spoken in small isolated areas, to becoming the majority or ‘big language’ of a large number of speakers.

I especially enjoyed Chapter 2 titled The Large Language Groups, which focuses on the histories of Germanic, Slavic, Romance and Bantu languages. The author describes how Bantu, a grouping of Southern African languages, was comprised of a number of scattered speakers as recently as 3000 years ago but with the development of farming there was a massive expansion in population and an increase in settlement throughout the southern half of the African continent. Currently there are about 180 million speakers of an approximate 300-600 Bantu languages of which only the major ones such as Swahili, Zulu and Xhosa are well known to outsiders.

In Chapter 11, How Languages Disappear, Janson discusses the various reasons why languages die out. The author makes a point of saying that most languages undergo a slow death rather than a rapid decline. Generally this occurs as over a number of generations another language comes to prominence in a given area, as knowledge of a more largely spoken language becomes more economically important. Globalization in general is causing large shifts in the use of language throughout the world with more and more people speaking one of the world’s major languages in addition to their local dialect. In future, these local dialects may be seen as unnecessary and die off as has happened with many indigenous languages around the world.

Currently there are between 6000 and 7000 languages in use globally, but Janson hypothesizes there may be as few as half as many within 100 years. He states, “the 60 largest languages, in terms of numbers of speakers, share more than 4 billion speakers among themselves. That is, about 1% of the [world’s] languages are used by about 75% of the speakers.” The breakdown of the number of languages per continent is roughly: Africa 30% of the world’s total with 2000 languages, the Americas at 15% with 1000 languages, Asia at 32% with 2200 languages, Europe at 3% with 230 languages, the Pacific at 19% with 1300 languages including the island of New Guinea with an estimated 1000 languages alone!

In the final chapters, the author hypothesizes what the language situation on earth may be in 200, 2000 or 2 million years. I have often wondered about the future of languages. No doubt, the English spoken far in the future will be nearly unrecognizable to today’s English as languages are always changing as long as they are in use. It is hard to visualize this as a learner or speaker of a modern language as the changes happen so slowly as to be easily overlooked in one or two generations. Nevertheless, if you pick up a book written a mere 200 years ago there will be a lot of grammatical structures and phrases unfamiliar to the modern speaker.

Of particular interest to me was the second chapter titled The 6000 Languages Develop into Clusters of Sublanguages. This chapter includes a treatment of the German language. With good humor the author explains how hard it was for him at times to communicate with German-speaking people in certain regions of Germany, even after having studied  standard German for a number of years.  This is due to the deep variance found between regional dialects and standard German or Hoch Deutsch. He  includes humorous examples of the comic strip Asterix and Obelix  to demonstrate his point. McWhorter makes the interesting argument that what is considered the standard form of a given language is somewhat arbitrary as someone unfamiliar with that language would not be able to distinguish between various dialects and what is accepted to be the standard form.

Another interesting topic of this book is language complexity. The overarching theme is that the more isolated a language is, the less speakers it has, and without the standardization writing brings, certain languages have developed to the point where it takes children until age 10 to be able to communicate in it on a basic level.  These kind of complexities are hard to imagine for those of us whose primary language is one of the world’s top 20 languages. The author specifically references Luo, a language of Kenya. It has over millennia developed an entirely different plural form of each noun! For example, singular for the word man is bawo and the plural men is bape. Another language, this time a Native American language, Pomo, uses prefixes to demonstrate remarkable precision. For example, da-represents “by pushing with the palm” and therefore dayol means “to fold in dry ingredients!”

In sum, for an interesting read on linguistics without the dryness sometimes found when reading on this topic I highly recommend The Power of Babel by John McWhorter. Another work of his entitled What Language is and What it Isn’t and What it Could be is also a great read. If you have any book recommendations on languages, linguistics or related topics please comment below.